Traditional Editors

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of traditional code editors that support VHDL and Verilog. While there are several dozens or perhaps hundres of editors with support for many languages, including VHDL, this list contains editors that are used by real VHDL and Verilog developers for real projects.

By traditional code editors, we mean general purpose text editors that have some support for the VHDL and Verilog languages. Usually this includes VHDL and Verilog syntax coloring and template expansion . Some editors provide some extra features such as code folding and automatically formatting VHDL and Verilog code.

Pricing ranges from free to a few hundred dollars for a perpetual license.

Emacs (or XEmacs) is special to VHDL, because of the powerful VHDL add-on (VHDL-mode, in Emacs terminology) written by Reto Zimmerman. This add-on makes extensive use of complex pattern matching to support operations such as instantiating components and fixing sensitivity lists.